Buy Shirts, Remember the Rally, Question Colbert, and Smile

In case you missed the 947 blog posts, there were a few rallies held on the 30th. We promised you trophies and graphs, and we’ve finally finished crunching the numbers.

Graphstravaganza

We borrowed a computer that looks like this and mapped out all the connections you made with your QR codes.

With the use of graph theory and a few well-placed PMs, we were able to identify which cluster was DC and which were the satellite rallies. We also found a few suspicious submissions, but to the suspects’ credit, every one of them openly admitted to cheating when we asked about it. Thanks for your (belated) honesty!

Okay, so we were talking about graphs… Let’s start with the big one, the Washington DC rally. 1909 redditors reported in from there, establishing 12,987 connections amongst themselves! If you’ll forgive our hubris, we’ve put ourselves at the center of the graph in red and colored everyone based on how many hops away they are from us. It’s a very tight cluster, which makes it a good model of the actual rally, where we were embedded in a ten-by-ten tent surrounded on all sides by an ocean of people.

Interestingly, everyone was five or fewer degrees of separation away from us with the sole exception of RainbootedRobot (bottom of graph, in purple), whose tent number of 6 qualifies for a special trophy variant.

The graphs for the satellite rallies follow. Post a comment about which constellation / chemical / Zelda dungeon each one looks like!

Seattle:

Chicago:

San Francisco:

Los Angeles:

Boston:

Austin:

Dallas:

St. Louis:

Portland:

The Twin Cities and Salt Lake City, in no particular order:

All of the rallies in one image:

The friendliest redditor was MrLister, who zapped or was zapped by 166 people!

myotheralt submitted more QR codes than anyone else — 125 in all. Whether this was a feat of furious scribbling or constant barcode scanning, it’s pretty impressive either way.

Our most prolific self-promoter was moge, who somehow convinced 99 other people to record and submit his QR code. What was your trick, moge?

It was very nice of DonorsChoose to let us share their tent, and one of the ways we helped repay them was by attracting a lot of attention. Anyone who came by to say hello walked away with a DonorsChoose gift certificate and a special gift from reddit: a free limited-run rally t-shirt. Bright orangered, the front depicts Abe Lincoln making the reddit sign, and the back is a copy of Stephen Colbert’s letter to the reddit community. (Graphic design by licenseplate, t-shirt artist extraordinaire.)

We figured that 1000 shirts ought to be enough for everyone, but demand exceeded all expectations. Every last shirt was snapped up, despite our strict enforcement of the “one shirt per person” and “you must actually know what reddit is” rules.

So, for those of you who just missed getting a shirt, and for those of you who weren’t there but want to tell your grandkids you were, there’s going to be a second run. Shirts are available for $25 atbustedtees.com/redditrally, and for every one we sell, we’re going to give 10% to DonorsChoose.

And this time, when they’re gone, they’re gone!

BTW, we need some photos of the shirt in action. If you have one (or want to make one right now) please upload it and post it in the comments.

The $500,000 AMA

Oh, one more thing… Stephen Colbert said he would let reddit interview him if you could raise $500,000 before the rally, and, naturally, you totally did. (I never doubted you, reddit.)